Learn more about McAfee's newest Pervasive Data Protection solution along with CASB. Join Dave Bull, Director of Data Protection Solutions, to learn how McAfee Pervasive Data Protection will allow you to discover and protect your on premise and cloud resident data from compromise via a centralized control plane.

Last Friday, multiple sources in Spain began reporting an outbreak of the ransomware now identified as WannaCry. Upon learning of these incidents, McAfee immediately began working to analyze samples of the ransomware and develop mitigation guidance and detection updates for its customers. By Friday afternoon, McAfee’s Global Threat Intelligence system was updated to identify all known WannaCry samples and the company had delivered DAT signature updates to all its customers.

This week’s attacks leveraging the WannaCry ransomware were the first time we’ve seen an attack combine worm tactics along with the business model of ransomware. The weaponization of the Eternal Blue exploit made public weeks ago, and unpatched MS-17-010 Windows OS vulnerabilities by the thousands enabled WannaCry to infect hundreds of thousands of computers, across industries, across continents, and within just a day.

Annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) was published recently, and once again, it is a hefty report that is sure to become one of the most referenced data breach reports in the world. Verizon's analysis is based on a broad set of real breach data collected from 65 law enforcement agencies, security product vendors, and security consulting firms. In fact, this year's report analyzed more than 42,000 incidents and 1,900 confirmed breaches spanning 84 countries and 20 industries. Although the data set is neither comprehensive nor a random sample, it certainly looks at a large set of data and is very likely to be directionally accurate.

The report reconfirms many of the things we already know, but it also provides many "aha" moments.

Every week, we read in the news of another breach or targeted campaign, as more patches are released to protect against the next strain of sophisticated malware. For the administrators responsible for safeguarding a company's systems, networks, and digital information, keeping up is an overwhelming task, made doubly difficult because it is often hard to determine the most significant threats.

To serve those admins, McAfee began work nine months ago to design a new dashboard that identifies the most significant threats and illustrates the relationships between them. We want to assist security practitioners when they make decisions about which vulnerabilities should be patched first, based on the prevalence of attacks that exploit those vulnerabilities.

In November 2016, we published a blog that drew comparisons between samples that we had received to that of the 2012 'Shamoon' campaign. Since November, there has been a considerable amount of research corroborating our initial assertions, which we have reviewed against our own continuing analysis. We found that the latest Shamoon campaigns are attacking a wider range of organizations, they are connected to other notable campaigns, and the increase in sophistication suggests investment, collaboration and coordination beyond that of a single hacker group, but rather that of the comprehensive operation of a nation-state.

Today's devices are becoming more internet-connected as we speak. As our world becomes further intertwined with technology, new doors open directly into our lives for potential threats. Hackers are quickly advancing with their attacks, making it detrimental for end users if security is not provided. Consumers within the retail, medical, industrial controls and now even the automotive industries are concerned with using devices in their environment due to the potential risk of a cyberattack. Thus, it is critical for device manufacturers and embedded OEMs to provide security within their devices.

Qvod used to be a popular video player and developer in China. Due to piracy allegations and a threatened fine, the company went out of business in 2014. In spite of this, we have recently seen a number of malicious fake versions of Qvod.

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